


Guests

by zeldadestry



Category: Brat'ya Karamazovy | Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Genre: Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 08:29:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If I believed a man could be perfected, I would say it is in the moment when he loves all men as he loves his brothers."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guests

**Author's Note:**

> written as an extra treat for Gileonnen in the 2008 yuletide fic exchange

This is the space Katya calls his study, but Ivan thinks of it only as the sick room. After all, this is where he keeps his books and his papers, every shelf and drawer is overflowing with words, theories and conjectures. They call his condition brain fever, how infernally apt!

Ivan sits on the daybed by the window, stares out at the leafless trees. He can hear Alyosha downstairs speaking to Katya, he hears them bustling round the kitchen, preparing tea. “Listen,” he says to his visitor. “We can hear them so when you speak they will be able to hear you, I hope, and that will prove, once and for all, that you are real.”

“Of course they can’t hear me,” says the devil, stretching his legs and cracking his knuckles. “Why do you continue to lie to yourself after everything that has happened? Why do you not admit I am inside you, within you, never outside, never without?” Ivan shudders, picks up the nearest blanket and wraps it around himself. “Insufficient armor against the likes of me,” notes the devil. “Or are you merely cold?”

“This room is drafty.”

“Strange then that Katya set you up in here, given your weak constitution.”

“Alyosha says I will outlive them all.”

“Does he now? Takes you for a cockroach, is that it?” The devil puts his index fingers up to his brow, wiggles them around as though they were antennae.

Ivan gags. “Stop that!” The devil’s playful grin strikes him as unspeakably malevolent. “You hate us so. All our suffering is a child’s game to you, it’s all for your perpetual amusement.”

“No being lives on folly alone, dear brother.”

“Do not call me that!”

“You do have a woeful habit of shouting at me. It rather hurts my feelings. I am your guest, after all. You’re the one who continually invites me here. The least you could do is offer me tea when you take your own.”

“You are a sponger,” Ivan hisses, “a parasite.”

The devil throws up his hands. “Come, come. All life exists at the expense of another, all beings are fleas, bloodsuckers. If you wish to insult me, you must do better than that.”

Ivan looks at his hands but they do not tremble. He is no longer frightened by the apparition, he only wishes to be free of it. “I have been thinking,” he begins, and the devil bursts out laughing, slapping his thighs in his uncontrollable mirth.

“You, thinking! Have you not observed that’s where all this trouble began? If you wish to believe, my friend, if you wish to know, you must not place your faith solely in reason. Well, well, I see from your murderous glare that I oughtn’t interrupt you. Go on, go on, by all means, go on. Who cares if I’ve heard it all before?”

“You have not yet heard me talk on this subject.”

“The nerve, the nerve!” The devil giggles. “Perhaps not from your lips, dear Ivan, but from the lips of so many others. I know, I know, you like to think no one has suffered and struggled as you have. Let me assure you, though it be such a blow to your pretensions, you are merely one of a great many.”

“No, I am not. I am alone in this world and you merely taunt me by saying I am not. Let us take the example closest to home, if you will. Consider Alyosha and Dimitri. They do not share a mother, as Alyosha and I do, and yet they are brothers to each other far more than either of them is to me.”

The devil spreads open his hands. “Even if it that were so, I’m not confirming that it is, but even if it were, why should you resent them for caring about each other? I must say, I’m impressed. Few of your type are willing to admit such selfishness. Don’t misunderstand me, I hear far more horrid confessions every day. The difference is that, seeing as you are a man who wants so badly to justify his high opinion of himself, your diabolic divulgences taste far sweeter.”

“You torture me with your gloating.”

“My apologies.”

“You have completely misunderstood me, anyway, as usual. What pains me is not that Alyosha is beloved, I do not begrudge him that, it is only that, ever since we were children, I have known myself an orphan beside him.”

“Alyosha loves the world, so the world loves him. You disdain the world, so…what follows? And yet you cling to this place and these people you claim to hate.”

“It is a useless world. I wish to crush it, throttle it.”

“You prove my point. You must have a very tight grip on something and hold it very close to destroy it.”

“Damn you!”

“Ah, bless you, you have hit upon my true fortune! Those words have no affect on me! Too late, too late.”

“Ivan?” Alyosha calls up the stairs. “Shall I bring your tea?”

“I want to see him,” says the devil. “I’ve missed him, he’s such an appallingly cheerful young man. Honestly, I envy him. Go on, ask him to sup with us.”

“Bring up your own as well,” Ivan orders.

“Very good,” Alyosha replies.

Ivan smoothes out the throw covering the daybed, he draws over a little table on which to put the tray just as his brother comes into the room carrying it. “Here, here, put it here.”

Alyosha does as instructed. “You must eat,” he says, passing Ivan a plate. “Look, there is good bread and butter, a delicious sausage.”

With the food in his hands, Ivan finds he is ravenous. He eats quickly, taking new bites before he finishes chewing the previous. “What an appetite!” sneers the devil and Ivan quickly raises his eyes to glare at him.

“What is it?” Alyosha asks.

Ivan puts down his plate, wipes his mouth and fingers on the napkin. “He is here, hounding me, hounding us. He asked to see you, especially.”

“Did he?”

“Does that frighten you?”

“Should it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is he?” Alyosha asks, searching the room. “Tell me, for I don’t yet see him.”

Ivan points across the room. “That is his chair.”

Alyosha walks over, puts out his hand and rests it on the high back as though he dares to look down on the demon. “Hello,” he says.

“He always sits there. He sits there like it’s his throne. ”

Alyosha turns his attention back to his brother. “Why then do you not take the chair out of the room?”

“And have him sit on my bed? Never. He is the epitome of rudeness and would not hesitate to do so. He thinks everything is his own.”

“It is not,” replies his brother. He walks back to Ivan, sits down beside him and looks him in the eyes. “None of it belongs to him.”

“You are so solemn! And yet I know by your calm that you are not scared. Why would you not fear him?”

“Because even he was made by god.”

“Easy for you to say, but what if I choose to believe only in him?”

“Only in the fallen part of yourself? Is that what you mean?”

Ivan frowns as he picks up his tea cup. “I don’t know what I mean. Something like that, I suppose.” He blows across the tea’s surface to cool it, takes a small sip. It is bitter. “Katya should have let you make the tea. She always steeps it too long.” He takes another sip, too much, it burns his tongue and he winces.

His brother’s hand rests on his back. “Are you alright?” Alyosha and his omnipresent sympathy, how absurd and sickening and wonderful he is!

“It was nothing. It is nothing.” Ah, has he just composed his own epitaph? How fitting that it could also be counted an epithet.

“Nothing troubles you?”

“Well. I have had a letter from Dimitri, several in fact, but I can not bring myself to read them.”

“Yes, Katya told me she was wondering when you might have a response for him.”

“Did she? Damn her! None of you will let me have my secret sins, you drag them all out into the open and pick through them, dissect them.”

“I would think you might consider Dimitri’s feelings in this as well as your own. He needs to know that you understand he does not blame you.”

“Tell him yourself!”

“It would mean more from you.”

“I don’t care. Leave me be. You have always loved him better, you have always loved him more, how sick of it I am.”

“I love both my brothers, and many more beside. The word more has no meaning in this sense. How do you propose we shall measure my love? Why do you assume it has such narrow limits? If I believed a man could be perfected, I would say it is in the moment when he loves all men as he loves his brothers.” The old clock in the room begins to chime the hours and Alyosha checks the time, then lifts Ivan’s hand to his lips. “I must go now, brother, I am expected at the church.”

“You will return tomorrow, of course.”

“Of course.” Alyosha helps Ivan to stand, puts an arm around him. “Come downstairs. Sit with Katya in the kitchen. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

Ivan looks around the room, but Alyosha speaks the truth. “You have scared him off,” he mutters. “No doubt you greatly offended him when you proclaimed him the property of god.”

Alyosha bows his head. “May we all be so insulted!” 


End file.
